The days fly for some people and are eternal for others

People of a certain age can perform a very simple exercise: If we compare our first ten years with the last ten that we have just lived, we will certainly have the impression that it took much more from childhood. How time then spread, when the summers were endless and seemed like a year! We all know that the watches and calendars are stubborn, inflexible, and that a minute always lasts the same as the previous one and that the next one, but also We are very clear that the time in our heads becomes fickle elastic, which can end an hour in a sigh or pass with difficult slowness. Pandemie has accentuating these delays in our perception of time, with the peculiarity that opposing versions can be heard: more than 80% of people say they have experienced some distortion in their feelings about how the days are over, but for some they fly others for a long time.

Our way to perceive time is a matter that interests scientists for many years, but still remains involved in a certain mystery. «There are different principles. One is the rhythms: time is a unique dimension, a continuum, but to estimate it we make it in units. The clearest rhythm is that of the days, and we have circadian rhythms, with a cycle that more or less fits the sunlight. On the other hand, we have events. If I am very boring, with nothing that interests me, I pay more attention to my body sensations, to that internal clock that we need. It is as if I looked many times and time makes me forever. On the other hand, if I make something that absorbs me, my attention is flying and I spend time flying: you don’t watch your time or analyze your sensations when you watch a good movie, “says Juan Lupiáñez, of the cognitive neuroscience group of the Mind Research Center of the University or Behavior.

But we must add a peculiar function to that starting point, because our conclusions about the fast or slowly the days they have passed on after behind, as a retrospective balance. And it turns out that the sensations are upside down: «One is the time we remember and something else is the moment we experience it. A summer in which you work, doing very annoying things, will give you the impression that time is going very slowly, but then you will not remember anything of that summer, as if nothing had lasted. An older person who leads a monotonous life can tell you that the last ten years have flown, but that each of his days lasts an eternity, “says Lupiáñez. Certainly, with that lost paradise of childhood the same thing happens that we were in us, without us knowing, if we were in our important things.

Numerous studies have confirmed the intuition that subjective time accelerates as we get older, a trend related to the amount of important memories. “In childhood, adolescence and youth, life is full of ‘first time’ … Every year of a child is a completely new year, and then the first kiss, the first trip comes abroad without the parents, the first salary …”, ” The German researcher Marc Wittmann lists. From a certain moment the biography is marked by routines and the memory only finds sporadic occasions to submit a really important event. «Probably our last ten years – Lupiáñez adds – one has been like another: More than having ten years of memory, we have multiplied the memory of the same year by ten. People often underestimate the things that are the same. It even happens if you ask people a bit more, if 22+22 or 21+23, who tend to think that 21+23 is more, or with the lines that they see the sum of two lines smaller than that of two uneven lines, although they measure the same in total. This also happens.

Body changes

Pandemie, this time in which we all have some laboratory mice, has imposed a radical version of those routines, while we excite our emotions to make holes for fear, fear and uncertainty. In many cases, The boundaries between work and leisure have been erased and some cultural markers of time have lost importance, such as the weekend. All this has unorganized our ‘feeling of time’. «What we are that time is something that creates our brains, although it is not known where that is internal, brain sonder. A theory is that the brain generates that feeling of ‘second’ from the body states. In a day we are hungry, we are not hungry, we are getting excited, we run … everything that generates changes in how we breathe, in muscle tension, in our temperature, and The brain says: if there are a thousand changes in a day, there are a thousand units in a day. In situations such as Pandemie we stop living substantive events, every day they become the same, nothing is passionate, the best that we only experience a hundred of those states: we need ten days of that way of life to reach the thousands that lasted earlier one day. And when everything slows, the brain feels that time has passed faster, ”says Rafael Román, researcher at the Mind Research Center, Brain and Behavior.

But in all this, emotions, so personal and non -transferable, and also as unmanageable in an unprecedented situation as we live, have a decisive weight. That is why we can also find the opposite profile: «There are emotions, such as fear or anger, that are very exciting –Detalla Román. Psychologists say that they have a lot of activation, so when we go inside very quickly, everything slows down: it is as if you stumble, that those ten milliseconds will become eternal ».